Thursday, January 23, 2014

We spent a week making Trello boards load extremely fast. Here’s how we did it. (blog.fogcreek.com)

We made a promise with Trello: you can see your entire project in a single glance. That means we can show you all of your cards so you can easily see things like who is doing what, where a task is in the process, and so forth, just by scrolling. You all make lots of cards. But when the site went to load all of your hundreds and thousands of cards at once, boards were loading pretty slow. Okay, not just pretty slow, painfully slow. If you had a thousand or so cards, it would take seven to eight seconds to completely render. In that time, the browser was totally locked up. You couldn’t click anything. You couldn’t scroll. You just had to sit there.

So I set out on a mission: using a 906 card board on a 1400×1000 pixel window, I wanted to improve board rendering performance by 10% every day for a week. It was bold. It was crazy. Somebody might have said it was impossible. But I proved that theoretical person wrong. We more than achieved that goal. We got perceived rendering time for our big board down to one second. Naturally, I kept track of my daily progress and implementation details in Trello. Here’s the log. Read more...